sjtrem.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13049-023-01088-8#:~:text=Hemorrhage%20is%20estimated%20to%20account,is%202%20h%20%5B3%5D.">leading cause of death in trauma patients between the ages of 1 and 46 years, largely because they cannot access safe blood sources quickly enough. A possible solution? Freeze-dried synthetic blood.
A multi-institutional team led by Dipanjan Pan, the Dorothy Foehr Huck & J. Lloyd Chair Professor in Nanomedicine at Penn State, recently received a five-year, $2.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to develop the next generation of synthetic blood.
"Mother nature is hard to mimic, but we're getting closer," said Pan, who is also a professor of materials science and engineering and of nuclear engineering. "Our goal is to design and optimize a blood substitute prototype, called Nano-RBC, that is based on a deformable nanoparticle. It is similar in shape to red blood cells and incorporates high-per-particle payloads of hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells responsible for carrying oxygen."
He explained that the odds of survival increase dramatically when a person can receive a transfusion before losing too much blood, but that's often not possible in rural or war-torn areas without the specialized processing and storage facilities donated blood requires.
"There is a need for an artificial oxygen carrier to substitute for banked blood in settings where stored blood is unavailable or undesirable," Pan said. "Artificial blood is described as the 'Holy Grail' of trauma medicine. Researchers have been battling to develop it for 150 years, with many failures along the way."
